Choplifter was a side-scrolling shooter that features a helicopter. HD (pronounced “ccchhhuud”) is the modern remake of it. The helicopter can go up and down, and side to side, and shoot. It’s just like it was in the old days, only a bit prettier. You can see the truth of that statement in the trailer below. It’s even being developed by inXile Entertainment, whose Big Boy project is Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. However, it’s my contention that such a direct pun (“Choplifter”) is actually categorically wasted here. This should have been a game about stealing candy from a store using a remote-control helicopter, while the enraged store owner chases your miscreant contraption about with a baseball bat. That is my firm belief, and I will not move from it.

Yeah. I do wonder what this phobia of colourful, and/or interesting/characterful graphics is about, where instead a large amount of developers would choose to drain every drop of character out of a game reboot so that there’s nothing left but a soulless husk. And I think that people are catching up to me in regards to being tired of soulless husks.

Reboot-making developers – there are plenty of remakes of old games out there, look them up, they’re often free and they do it right. Need a commercial example of a reboot doing it mostly right? Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

I guess there is a variant (MH-60L Direct Action Penetrator (DAP)) with rocket pods, but my main impression of the Black Hawk is that they are designed to “go down”. Perhaps you get multiple lives and the second chopper has to rescue the crew of the first chopper, which goes down and then needs to be rescued by the next chopper etc.

Perhaps on account of the dissonance between the classic arcade mechanics and “realistic” presentation, one thing that struck me whilst watching that video is the degree of cultural indoctrination required for the player to reject the classical themes of weak/good vs. strong/evil and rooting for the underdog in favour of empathising with the high-tech military machine cheerfully wreaking havoc over a squalid township.

I’m amazed at how much better Choplifter looked on the Apple II than in this remake.
Muddled, generic graphics with a busy screen that makes it difficult to pick out essential details like the location of the chopper and the refugees. The original has simple, clear graphics that readily identify the game elements.